


turn to stone

by steelplatedhearts



Series: War Paint and Cyanide Pills [7]
Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-05
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-20 09:07:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/583640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelplatedhearts/pseuds/steelplatedhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They've collectively seen more graves, more tombstones and monuments than anyone should. They deal. They don't always deal well, but they deal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	turn to stone

Bond gives himself five minutes to cry. No more, no less.

It’s odd, he thinks (in a rather detached sort of way), how “the job’s done and the bitch is dead” keeps being applicable to his life. That’s not exactly the motto he would have picked for himself, but he’s starting to think that you don’t get to choose your own words to live by. They choose you.

As they leave the chapel, he allows himself a brief glance at his parent’s graves, and then puts them out of his mind.

He goes to M’s funeral and looks appropriately sad, and visits her grave once so the shrinks will see that he’s going through the grieving process, or whatever it is that the shrinks think he’s accomplishing.

He watches when they strike Tiago Rodriguez’s name off the memorial wall.

Then he puts the whole thing aside—not out of his mind entirely, but into a corner of his brain somewhere—and goes back to work.

There are jobs to be done, after all.

*   *   *   *   *

Silva insists on visiting Her grave every time they’re in London. He dresses somberly, and the somberness seems to be important to him, so Shosanna grabs a worn black jacket and jams a black beret on her head and follows him out to the cemetery.

Her headstone is simple—a name, birthdate and death date, with a few lines of poetry underneath. Shosanna stands off to the side and smokes while Silva talks to Her.

It is different every time. Sometimes he forgives Her, sometimes he rages and snarls at the headstone, sometimes he stands in silence.

Once, he cried, but Shosanna does not comment on it.

The first visit, she’s feeling a not insignificant amount of animosity towards Her. Even in death, MI6 agents continue to take Raoul away from her. So, when they turn to leave, she pauses, drops her cigarette on the grave, and grinds it into the ground with the heel of her boot.

He has a hand around her neck in a heartbeat, cutting off her air. “Don’t,” he growls. “Don’t ever do that again.”

She knees him, and when he slackens his grip she wrenches away and slaps him, leaving a bright red handprint on his cheek.

“No promises,” she says, striding towards the car.

She does not do it again.

*   *   *   *   *

They visit the memorial wall once—heavily disguised, of course. Shosanna is twitchy and nervous about being in the building at all, so Silva sends her out to wait in the car.

He stares at the wall, running his fingers over the names until he finds the space where Tiago Rodriguez used to be honored.

He doesn’t quite understand why the name had to be struck off. Tiago Rodriguez died in the service of England.

What came after was another man entirely.

It isn’t fair to punish Tiago for Raoul’s crimes.

*   *   *   *   *

Q does not visit graves.

He goes to the funeral, yes, but then the funeral is over and there’s nothing more to do. He doesn’t understand why people have such a fascination with visiting the corpses of their loved ones.

There is enough to deal with in the present. He doesn’t have any intention on wasting time by dwelling on the past.

He thinks about death frequently, though. One too many instances of listening to Bond in his ear and being utterly convinced that the agent’s going to die will do that, not to mention when his brain is blank and empty and he’s not thinking about anything at all he can hear _but if anyone’s going to murder you, it’s going to be me_ repeating over and over until it’s background noise.

He is mugged one day, walking back to his flat late at night. The man has a gun in his hand and desperation in his voice.

The man threatens to shoot him, and Q feels oddly relaxed.

“You can’t kill me,” he says calmly. The man starts to splutter.

“Who’s got the gun here, you or me?” he asks, and Q almost laughs.

“You. But you can’t kill me. That position’s been filled.”

*   *   *   *   *

Tanner leaves a sunflower on M’s grave once a month for the first year, and then once a year on her birthday after that.

People seem to think of her solely as M, the battle-axe of MI6, but she must have had other things going on in her life, he reasons. Maybe some sort of softness, some hobbies and interests.

There is nobody left to remember her that way. Her husband is dead. She had no children anymore.

So Tanner takes it upon himself to remember her that way, to remember an M who may have liked knitting or walks in the park or bad reality shows.

It might not be real. But it comforts him.

*   *   *   *   *

Shosanna does not want to take Raoul with her when she visits her family’s graves, but he comes along anyway. The headstones are as plain as they can be—there wasn’t a lot of money left, and M. LaPadite had helped out where he could, but he had three daughters to take care of.

She walks up and down the rows, repeating the words carved into the stones to herself, like a mantra.

_Jacob Dreyfus, 1954-2001. Beloved husband and father._

_Miriam Dreyfus, 1956-2001. Beloved wife and mother._

_Amos Dreyfus, 1991-2001. Beloved son and brother._

Raoul is blessedly silent. She leaves a small handful of daisies picked out of someone’s garden on each grave and then leaves.

She does not look back.

*   *   *   *   *

They’re in Paris when Raoul spots a burnt-out shell of a building. His eyes light up.

“Look at that, _ratita!_ The blaze must have been glorious, no?"

Shosanna barely glances at the ruins of the once-beautiful movie theater. “ _Oui._ Glorious.”

She slips out later in the afternoon on the pretext of getting lunch. Raoul does not notice, so focused is he on his laptop. He’s attempting to rig a small senate election in America, just to see if he can.

Instead of lunch, she heads out to one of the many graveyards in Paris, strolling through the rows until she finds the one she wants.

_Marcel Beaumont._

_Born 1983, died 2005._

She doesn’t say anything, just leaves the rose on the ground and stands there a moment, hand resting on the headstone.

She then puts it out of her mind, heading back home. Back to Raoul.

*   *   *   *   *

They didn’t take Bond’s gravestone away, once he was revealed to be alive. They reasoned that he’d need it _eventually_.

Eve can never decide if she thinks that’s morbid or practical.

She keeps finding herself drawn to it, starting out walks with the intention of going to the shop or for coffee, ending up standing in front of his future grave staring at the cold stone words.

Bond will end up here for real sooner rather than later. Eve’s seen the statistics. 00’s have almost laughably short life expectancies. Someday he will die, and thankfully it will most likely not be her fault.

That’s probably selfish of her, worrying more about being seen as responsible for his death rather than the fact that he will be dead, but she doesn’t care. She remembers what it was like, being the agent that killed 007. She’d hated it. Nobody ever seemed to remember that it was M who’d really pulled the trigger.

Q tells her to stop going by the cemetery, worries over her like a mother hen when she shows up to work with grave dirt on her feet.

She laughs and tells him to _quit hovering, Q_ , but truth be told, she worries a bit as well. It’s like she just barely missed being in some catastrophic accident, and now can’t help revisiting the scene over and over again, thinking _it could have been me_.

She sees Bond there, once. He’s staring at his headstone like it’s some curious little animal that’s crawled up into his lap—it’s nice, but he doesn’t know what to do with it.

“Q’s been fretting,” he says, when she’s within earshot. “Says you spend too much time here.” He grins. “I’m touched.”

“Q needs to keep his mouth shut once in a while,” she grumbles.

“We all kill people we don’t mean to,” he says abruptly. “Sometimes with a gun. Sometimes…other ways.”

Eve thinks of M, of the whispers she’s heard of a woman named Vesper.

“The most you can do,” he says, “is survive it.”

“Does it get easier?” she asks.

“Depends on what you mean by easier.”

Eve’s not sure what she means. But she suspects that no matter how she’d defined it, the answer would have been no.

“You should stop hanging around here so much,” Bond says. “It can’t be healthy.”

If _Bond_ says something’s not healthy, than it must be pretty bad. So she trains her feet away from the plot of land, recalculates her routes to work and the pubs.

She still visits every so often, though. She needs to remember this place, this grave. She doesn’t know why, but it seems important, somehow.

Then the grave is filled, and she stops going.

Bond had been right. It wasn’t healthy.


End file.
